


Home, Sweet Home

by AnnetheCatDetective



Series: Give Me The News [3]
Category: St. Elsewhere
Genre: Angst, Episode Related, Gen, Introspection, Intrusive Thoughts, Victor Ehrlich: Disaster Bi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 03:51:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17036093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnetheCatDetective/pseuds/AnnetheCatDetective
Summary: Post-Dog Day Hospital, an attempt at stress relief.





	Home, Sweet Home

    The minute he’s out of the O.R. he’s shaking himself to pieces-- he doesn’t even make it down the hall to a toilet, he throws up right in the bio waste bin, could just imagine Dr. Craig’s familiar ‘for crying out _loud_ , Ehrlich!’, even with the man himself in O.R. 2, but there’s no _room_ to feel bad about anything right now, except for everything that’s just happened to him. He feels like he could _faint_. How he held it together, he can’t even say, there’s not even room for any pride in the fact that he mostly really had.

 

    He doesn’t even get to go _home_ when it’s over, and on call is full up, and so he winds up in the only lounge that’s empty, and the one saving grace of his entire terrible day is that it’s the one with his favorite couch, the only couch he remotely fits on for a nap, but the nap doesn’t help.

 

    That’s the problem with exhaustion sleep, it’s no sleep at all. When it’s so bad that it doesn’t matter how wired he is, how shaken up, it might as well not even happen for all the good it does him, he just wants to be _home_. He doesn’t even want his bed, or not right away, because it’ll only be the same rotten kind of sleep and he just feels so lousy, but he wants to be home.

 

    He hadn’t had any room to react and feel things in the O.R., or not much, but on the train home he does. Jumps every time one of the other handful of weary passengers so much as coughs, jumps out of his skin. A gun! She’d pointed it right at him, a gun! He doesn’t know how Dr. Craig had been so _confident_ , he’d been brave and everything, he’d been his regular, normal old self. Did this kind of thing happen often? Was it going to happen to him again?

 

    He almost wishes he hadn’t kicked Fiscus out quite so soon, as he trudges home alone. He’d gotten rid of him, though, and their friendship was going to be better for it, it’s just…

 

    It feels like a bad night to be home alone.

 

    He imagines someone, sometimes, at times like this. A girl, sometimes, the kind of girl who would rub his shoulders if she were real, but who listens sweetly and tells him things are going to be all right. He doesn’t imagine her waiting around at home for him, he imagines they walk down the hall together, and he holds the door open for her, and she goes to sit and put her feet up while he makes dinner, pretends it’s just their routine. Pretends he washes and she dries, when he puts the dishes on the rack to drip a while.

 

    He feels kind of dumb doing it, but it helps to have someone to imagine he’s venting to when he needs to process something sometimes, when it’s been an extraordinarily bad day like this one. Boy, he doesn’t think he’s ever had such a bad day.

 

    There’s a lot left to do, at least, even after getting Fiscus’ things out. He’d only been able to do so much on his day off to clean.

 

    He puts a record on first, Shut Down, and then he pulls everything off the bookshelf, jumbles it up on the sofa so that he can reorganize.

 

    This time he imagines a man. Not a… not a boyfriend. Just a friend. Not Fiscus, who he’s finally gotten out of his apartment, except even after he thought he’d moved everything out, he keeps finding things. Not really anybody. Or-- everybody. Whoever he most needs to hear at any given moment, Fiscus eventually included, as he recounts his harrowing experience, all the things he hadn’t been able to feel at the time. A couple of women he knows as well, it cycles, even though he doesn’t imagine an apartment full of people, he just imagines one person on the end of the couch who’s sometimes somebody different, and he tries to get the words out about his day.

 

    He’d frozen up a little, but then he’d gotten on with it, and it was fine, just… just then when it was over, he’d felt everything all at once. It all hit him and it’s still all hitting him, as he struggles to put anything into words.

 

    “She said, baby when you race today, just take along my love for you…” He sings along a half a moment, distractedly, as he shelves, as the lyrics keep getting jumbled into his imaginary conversation, so that he gets back a ‘don’t worry, baby’ when he tries to talk about his day _the gun_ in the O.R. _the gun_ and how _the gun_ disastrously _the gun_ his first time _the gun_ had been.

 

    It’s not very helpful. It’s not very helpful to imagine two or three different friends calling him ‘baby’, either, not that he’d get bent out of shape about it. There are circumstances under which he thinks you can call a friend ‘baby’ and it’s normal, or it’s normal enough.

 

    It’s just that _the gun, pointed right at him, and he wasn’t even who she was mad at but she wanted to shoot him anyway and a part of him had shut down so that the rest of him could work but the gun went off the gun went off the radio the gun the ringing in his ears his body his mouth his brain on autopilot not allowed to think about the gun about how you could die you could have died THE GUN_ it had been such a long day and it was supposed to be such a routine thing _and the patient and the gun and the Patient and The Gun THE GUN_ and Fiscus would tell him he should get a gun, but Fiscus got over that, the real Fiscus did, the one in his head is just…

 

    He doesn’t think he could do that. It’s the last thing he wants after what he’d been through, he doesn’t want to _see_ another gun. He doesn’t want to see anything that looks like a gun.

 

    His back aches by the time he’s finished the bookshelves, maybe he could sleep, but a car backfires in the alley _the gun_ and he jumps half a foot off the ground and nearly falls back onto the recently cleared sofa _not here this was home home was safe the gun not here_ and his stomach grumbles, empty, but it also feels too sick and small to feed.

 

    He pulls a baking sheet out of a drawer, and cautiously leans it up in the window over the sink, before he sets to cleaning, scrubbing down every surface that hasn’t been properly cleansed since his apartment so recently became his own again. Even with the baking sheet _the gun_ in place, he doesn’t take his time crossing past the window _the gun_ , not more time than he has to. Every time he goes back to the sink his palms _the gun_ start sweating. He doesn’t live in the worst neighborhood there is but _the gun_ he can’t afford to live in a very nice one and why shouldn’t this _the gun_ happen to him when everything else does?

 

    “How long does it take to get over this?” He asks, and he imagines Fiscus telling him it takes a couple weeks, but he doesn’t know if that’s true.

 

    A pregnant woman boarded his train and he almost moved cars. At least she just thought he was being nice by giving her his seat really really quickly, but hell, he can’t… he can’t walk around being terrified of pregnant women, too. He can’t start feeling clammy every time he goes into the O.R., he can’t _think about the gun, can’t think about the gun, but just try not thinking about the gun_.

 

    He makes three nights’ worth of pasta, and swedish meatballs, and a chicken with rosemary, and preps some vegetables, and if he has the pasta and swedish meatballs now, then he’s got one night of buttered noodles with a vegetable medley and a half chicken, another night with marinara out of a can, the rest of the chicken.

 

    He still can’t sleep, exhausted as he is, but he makes himself eat.

 

    Two more nights accounted for. And then he doesn’t know. Then the mexican restaurant Morrison had assured him was authentic, which he’d had reservations about, but he’s desperate _the gun_ for comfort _the gun_ and he’s not always going to have the time or the energy to cook three meals at once, he technically doesn’t have either of those things, he just can’t _the gun_ sleep, and he still has his doubts, honestly, but it’s been months since he’s even spoken to someone who knew what ceviche _is_ , let alone where to get it, which just seems shameful for a city with fresh seafood, and he’s not going to get it, sure, because according to Morrison this place is Jalisco and not Norteño, let alone Baja, but it’s not like he needs it to be ceviche, it’s not even that he _likes_ ceviche, it’s the fact that no one knows what he’s talking about and he can’t find a decent, normal taco, and apparently it’s not the place Morrison lives near, with the olives, but he’d said sometimes it was worth the trip, and honestly Victor just feels _the gun_ so tired and he’s willing to try at this point, because the worst thing that can happen _the gun_ is that the food won’t be familiar and he won’t like it, but it’s not like _The Gun_ it could do more than spoil one evening, it’s not like _THE GUN_ it’s so big a _THE GUN_ deal.

 

    He doesn’t eat near any windows. He falls asleep on his own sofa with the dishes undone. He wakes up when the neighbor’s door _the gun_ slams and he does the dishes and he drags himself to bed and imagines he’s a little less alone. In the dark he can imagine a formless sort of someone. Warm and already asleep and plausibly female, if anyone was to interrogate his imagination, but possibly not. Someone to fall asleep next to, and then the apartment is just a little more safe and nothing _the gun_ is going to happen and in the morning _he_ she would tell him everything was going to be all right, he can’t only have another hour before he has to get up… he doesn’t want to go back _the gun_ but he doesn’t want to call in sick _Craig will know you’re not sick, will know you’re just scared, and he wasn’t scared at all, so in an hour you’d better get ready to go back to work_ and he doesn’t want to stay home _alone_ , he’s just exhausted, but he can’t be calm if he doesn’t do something to calm down, and it always works to clean something, organize something, cook something, he’s good at those things and they calm him except _the gun_ tonight _The Gun_ when nothing works.

 

    He doesn’t get an hour more of sleep. He doesn’t get forty-five minutes more.

 

    He maybe gets thirty. He doesn’t feel like breakfast.

 

    He showers _the gun_ and dresses _the gun_ , in his second favorite shirt, _the gun_ because someone still has to replace his favorite, and he’s looking at his ties _the Gun_ and he keeps them organized and he knows what goes with what and he’s looking at his ties and he can only think _the gun_ that he doesn’t know anymore how anything works. The keen color sense he’d prided himself on _the gun_ has fled and does it matter if he wears a tie at all?

 

    It does, no, it does, because if there’s one thing scarier than _the gun_ being held at gunpoint, it’s what Dr. Craig would say if he showed up to work without a tie _laughable that he should be bothered by that now, of course it’s not of course it’s not of course the gun of course it’s not The GUN THE GUN THE GUN so what does any of it matter when it could all be over in an instant?_

 

    The worst part, he decides, the worst part is _the GUN_ that she’d had a craving for one of those cheap fast food tacos, as if a taco d’oro doesn’t just shatter into a bunch of _THE GUN_ pieces and suppose food goes flying around in the operating room, huh? Suppose _THE GUN_ she’s gesturing with _the gun_ this _fucking_ so-called taco with all the crumbling bits that don’t hold together _goes off suppose the GUN HAD GONE OFF SUPPOSE A GUN GOES OFF A GUN THE GUN SUPPOSE SHE SHOT YOU_ , food flying around in the operating room with her spit all over it, so unsanitary, that’s really _THE GUN_ the worst part, the unsanitary environment for the patient.

 

    He goes in to work without a tie.


End file.
